Re-rewind: Life Is Strange Episode 4 Is Out

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It’s here! Life Is Strange [official site] Episode 4 is here and I’ve almost entirely avoided spoilers. This was slightly ruined by checking the Steam page in preparation for writing this story, but I’m sadly used to that in this line of work. It’s rare that I don’t know heaps about a game by the time it comes out. You can choose to avoid things, but muggins here the News Editor must see all.

The point is: Episode 4 of the time-travelling chat-o-adventure is out, zipping down my Steampipe as I write this. Trailer and mild spoilers and whatnot follow. Not big ones, though – those won’t come until Pip, Adam, and I have all played it and reconvene for another little chat.

Heck, at this point all I’ll do is repeat my last post. Here’s the official description of what goes down:

“Max realizes that changing the past can lead to painful consequences and that time is not a great healer. Her investigation into the disappearance of Rachel Amber begins to reach a thrilling conclusion as she finds the Dark Room. Will the answers lie within? Or will there just be trouble?”

And here’s the launch trailer from last week:

I may return to update this post in a few hours with big exclamations like “OH MY GOD” and “NO WAY” and “NUH UH THAT CAN’T BE REAL.”

I honestly shrieked with excitement when I saw Steam downloading 2.3GB for Life is Strange yesterday. (Well, it was queued up behind another five updates for other games – upon which I promptly smashed the button to queue up LiS instead).
I now walk the line of forcing myself not to eat through the episode entirely too fast all at once – pace myself to try and make it last, as I tend to try to do with things I truly enjoy.

Played some yesterday – the very first major choice the game has you make is already brutal.

Furthermore, I know people have complained about the dialogue in the game, how it can go wonky at times, but the dubbing has been getting better and better – and it seems the lip syncing is vastly improved this episode, too, though that might be just my impression?

I only had a couple of minor jarring moments related to that, where I am talking to someone as Max in a super emotional conversation, and when the options for dialogue run out, the emotion is abruptly cut by a standard run-of-the-mill end of conversation line. (Purely invented example: Max is saying, in a hoarse voice filled with emotion and tears, “I can’t believe that… Warren has ebola… sniffle…” and then CUT to Max chipperly going “Thanks for the talk Joyce, see you later!”.)

Episode 4 had a particular decision (you’ll know it when you see it) which was literally “yes” / “no” / “I don’t know” … and that was such a shocker that I literally paused it and walked away for half an hour and watched an old TV show while I pondered. And then picked “I don’t know”. And then picked one of the other answers, and cried a bit, but didn’t try to undo it because I knew I’d picked the right one.

And that’s in the first part of the episode.

Amazing.

“I hope you weren’t messing with the timeline while I was sleeping.” OH GOD YOU WILL NEVER KNOW

When the decision prompt popped up, I just silently stared at the screen for a minute and dropped the controller on a handily-placed pillow nearby. I also picked “I don’t know” and almost walked away again when the next prompt came up.

To any doubters, this one episode alone is worth blowing your way through the inconsistent writing, the bad lip sync, the overused hellas, and everything in between. Certain moments in the first hour of this episode exceed the intensity of many top-shelf game climaxes.

That said, like a lot of the more gut wrenching and/or shocking parts this episode, I can’t help but feel like the actual severity of the situation is defused somewhat by your character having crazy time powers. I mean, heck. Both with that and with… certain things towards the end, my main response was to kinda shrug and figure ‘well sure, but I’m just gonna reset things afterwards, right?’

Yeah, I kind of wish there had been some time to make me live with the consequences of my decision. It felt a little cheap to reset everything so quickly after such a major choice.

In general, I’m really impressed with how well they handled things. I was very worried about the way things might go after the end of the last episode, but the writing is strong enough that it avoids any massively offensive stumbles. It’s a little disappointing that was the only way they could think of to resolve it, as if they were worried there was one major moral issue they’d missed out. Given they story it looks like they’re telling, it would be unfair to criticise them for not being brave enough, but I can’t help thinking it would have been nice to see something like the waterfront scene being the happy ending.

While I enjoyed the series so far, except for the detour via the polaroid in episodes 3 & 4, the ending to chapter 4 makes it seem like the choices are mostly illusory. It certainly doesn’t look like any other outcome is possible, and many of the minor choices don’t seem to have any lasting relevance.

Not so sure, in the stats after the episode I saw some choices regarding Frank that I don’t think were possible for my playthrough (not sure, have to test). But yes, I’m wondering aswell how different storylines are with different choices (need to test).